The door of the lavish guest suite shut behind her. Elara was alone— alone in a still kind of silence that was anything but peaceful. It was the sort of quiet that settles over a battlefield after the massacre, when the ground is coated in blood and bodies litter the earth. Quiet, but never peaceful.
Being alone felt like a task. The initial attendants had left, but the personal lady-in-waiting was strangely watchful; Elara had to issue an explicit order to be left in peace before the woman finally retreated, though Elara was certain the woman lingered just beyond the chamber doors.
Her hands trembled. Her knees buckled and she slid to the floor, the black silk of her travelling dress pooling around her. The mask of the grieving daughter had slipped away; only the cornered, desperate mother remained.
She crawled forward, not trusting her legs to bear her weight for long. Her fingers fumbled at the clasps of her travelling case, and after a trembling search through folded gowns and perfumed sachets, she found what she was looking for.
A voice— small and terrified— rumbled in her head: they searched everything. They know. They suspect.
Tears of pure, undiluted fear welled in her stormy grey eyes, usually so full of pride and ambition, now raw and pleading. Still, she had to report. He would expect it.
With shaking fingers she produced a small hand mirror. The gilded frame was a pretty trinket befitting any wealthy lady; the guards had given it no second glance. To them it was just a mirror. It was anything but.
This was an artifact of blood magic—one made for instant communication by Cynthia, the witch in Cyrus's court.
Her breath hitched. There was no more putting it off. She brought the pad of a finger to her mouth, clenched her teeth, and in a swift, painful motion cut herself. A fat bead of crimson welled on the fingertip. She hastily pressed it to the mirror's surface and clumsily smeared the blood across the glass.
"C...Cyrus Corvette," she whispered, voice little more than a breath.
For a moment nothing happened.
Then the blood was absorbed into the glass, vanishing as if it had never been there. The mirror cleared—yet the face that stared back at her was not her own.
It was Cyrus. He sat in a dim chamber; the light around him was thin and the expression on his face a mask of cold impatience and displeasure. Her panic told him the report would be bad.
"Report," he said. His voice came through the glass dry and rasping, as if from far away.
"They searched me," she whispered. The words trembled. "Everything. They took the pins. They haven't discovered poison on them yet, but they flagged the pins as suspicious. I cannot use them now."
"Useless," Cyrus murmured, and the word was all ice. The pins had been the first option—he had anticipated a search, so he had not sent her with anything obvious. It had been a gamble.
"I'm being watched closely," she continued, breath quickening. "They suspect. Especially the prince—his eyes. He was sharp, as if he already knew I'm sent by you. There is a guard with me at all times, and a lady-in-waiting who watches too closely. Delivering anything to me via your allies will be impossible."
Cyrus's face darkened. Under the anger there flickered something worse: a raw, thin desperation that frightened her more than cruelty ever could.
"You foolish woman," he hissed. "I gave you one task. One!"
"And I told you it was a risk!" she snapped back, the old defiance flaring. "The Vellurians aren't fools—especially that prince who shadows the emperor. I could not refuse the search or the companion without making myself more suspicious!"
Cyrus's eyes glinted with a dangerous light. "We move to the last resort," he said. "The medicine I gave you. The vial. Ingest it."
Elara froze. Her blood ran cold. The memory of the small black vial he had pressed into her hand as she left rose in her mind: a so-called medicine, handed over with no explanation. She had thought it precautionary. The finality in his voice told her otherwise.
"No—no, it— you said— you said only if— I don't even know what it does. I won't—" Her voice broke.
"The circumstances have changed," he snapped. "You don't need to know what it does. Ingest it. You will become the weapon. Approach Elliott during the funeral. Get him somewhere with you, whisper 'Nex cruoris'. You will only need two minutes—the poison will act instantly. It will take him while you act as its host. Two minutes, and Elliott Lancaster—that lucky fool who keeps poking into places where he doesn't belong—will finally be dead."
A sob escaped her. Her hand flew to her mouth as the reality crashed down. "That's a death sentence for me as well! A painful, morbid one! If I'm the poison's host it will consume me first!"
Cyrus did not change. There was no mercy in his face—only a hard, practiced cruelty.
"You think I care?" he thundered. "You were dead the moment you walked into that palace. Even if the pins had worked, do you truly think his guards would have let you leave alive? You would have been cut down immediately. You were never supposed to complete this task alive. You were always expendable. Your children, however..." A cruel, thin smile spread across his features. "Your children and your husband—their lives are still negotiable. If you succeed, I might let them live. If you fail..." He let the threat hang in the air like a guillotine.
Elara pressed the mirror to her knee, the glass warm against her shaking fingers. Her reflection—if a reflection it could still be called—was small and pale in the gilded oval. There was no heroism in her, only terror and a sudden, awful clarity: she had been a dead from the start.
There was a sharp crack as the connection severed. The mirror returned to its ordinary reflective state—Cyrus's cold, commanding face vanished, and in its place only Elara's own pale, tear-streaked reflection stared back at her.
Her hands gave out. The mirror clattered onto the marble floor with a hollow ring. She was already collapsed there—had she not been, she was certain her legs would have buckled beneath her anyway.
This is my doing, whispered a voice inside her, soft, self-aware, cruel. The thought itself was poison—more bitter, more suffocating than anything Cyrus could ever concoct.
Ambition. That had always been her sin.
First, she had been the daughter of a sidelined empress, born into shadows. Then she had grown up in the court of an emperor who only valued male heirs—her worth dismissed before she even learned to speak. After that, she was married off, pawned away to a safe kingdom, quiet and unimportant in the grand scheme of the world. Her husband was kind. Her husband loved her. He gave her three beautiful children. Her life had been safe. Her life had been peaceful.
And still—it had not been enough.
Only now, when she was about to lose all of it, forced to bargain her children's survival with her own life, did she realize just how fortunate she had been. Only now, on the edge of ruin, did the truth sting her.
When Elliott first fell ill—poisoned by saffron, they said—she had seen an opening. An opportunity for her long-nursed bitterness to finally bear fruit. She saw a chance to carve a future beyond being the overlooked daughter, the quiet queen of a minor land. Cyrus's power then had seemed absolute. Sooner or later, she believed, he would be rid of Elliott. She had told herself she was simply being pragmatic. She told herself she was protecting her children's place in the world.
In truth, she had been greedy. She had been foolish.
She had whispered in her husband's ear. She had urged, pressed, convinced him. He had been reluctant—he was gentle by nature, unwilling to plunge their small kingdom into the conflict of giants like Velluria and Altheria. But he trusted her. He loved her. That was his mistake. He had listened, and because of her, he had agreed.
Her bitterness toward Elliott—her half-brother who had ascended the throne while she remained a footnote—fed her ruthlessness. She had told herself she deserved more. That she had been cheated. That aligning with Cyrus was simply seizing her rightful chance.
And Cyrus had welcomed her. Open arms, honeyed words, endless promises. He painted a picture of her future—if he annexed Velluria, he would need a Lancaster figurehead to legitimize his rule. She would be that figurehead, he swore. She had believed him.
But when the tides of war shifted, when victory proved less certain, Cyrus began shifting his pieces. His promises evaporated, and she saw the truth: she had never been his ally. She had never been his equal at the table. She had only ever been a piece on his board—a tool.
And now, the pawn was being sacrificed.
Elara curled in on herself on the cold marble floor, drawing her knees to her chest, her silk dress tangling around her like a funeral shroud. Her sobs came silently, sharp little gasps that shook her body until she ached. She did not cry for Sydney.
She wept for her own folly. She wept for the children who would one day learn their mother's ambition had signed her death. She wept for the morbid, painful end awaiting her—a fate she had delivered to her own door, with her own hands, in her own blind hunger for power.
And the silence of the chamber pressed in, heavy and suffocating, like the grave itself.
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